Originally proposed new 100-year rainfall amounts posted shortly before hurricane Harvey. It shows 18″ of water falling across a large swath of the city. Houston only requires 6″ of detention. Where does the other ~12″ of water go?

Final NOAA rainfall maps were changed dramatically after Harvey. The area where more than 18″ of rainfall occurs now extends from East Houston to Beaumont.

Residents Against Flooding, the nonprofit group working nearly ten years to prevent man-made flooding in Houston, will host three speakers at its annual meeting:

Dan Crenshaw (R) and Todd Litton (D), two candidates seeking the seat of retiring U.S. Representative Ted Poe in the 2nd Congressional District this November will offer what they, if elected, would do about Houston’s dire flooding situation.

Attorney Bill King, former Chronicle Editorial Board Member and 2015 Houston Mayoral Candidate, will offer an alternative opinion about ReBuild Houston, also on the November ballot, as it relates to drainage and flooding.

As a nonprofit, RAF cannot endorse one candidate over another, however we can advocate for drainage improvements or policies that reduce flooding.

There are up to nine total questions with each candidate having up to 2 minutes to respond.

1 minute closing for each candidate

Starting at 8:00 to 8:15 – Audience Questions for Bill King, Todd Litton & Dan Crenshaw. Only Questions pertaining to flooding will be allowed by the audience. Please respect this!

8:30 – We hope you enjoyed this discussion!

Guest Biographies.

Bill King, a lawyer, is a respected civic leader in the Houston area. He is a former mayor of Kemah, former Houston Chronicle columnist, and has served on many civic boards. In 2015, he narrowly lost the closest mayoral election in Houston’s history.

Dan Crenshaw is a decorated former Navy Seal with a Masters in Public Administration from Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government and has been published in the National Review.

Todd Litton has served on numerous non-profit boards and committees, with his leadership recognized with the Children’s Defense Fund, Texas Lyceum and others. He has practiced law and worked in investments. He holds a law degree from the University of Texas and an MBA from Rice.

RESIDENTS AGAINST FLOODING is the oldest 501(c)(3) non-profit in the city focusing on policy matters to make Houston resilient to flooding. We have been taking flooding seriously since before 2009 and predicted the current flooding crisis. We are appealing our federal lawsuit against the city to the U.S. Supreme Court later this month. The goal is to force the city to focus its spending on flooding infrastructure and not pet projects for campaign donors. The city is fighting dirty, and we expect they will continue.

Candidate Questions

What is your big-picture strategy for solving flooding in the Houston region? What will be your urgency level?

What major federal flood infrastructure projects, if any, do you think are needed for the Houston area?

Government is known for partisanship and gridlock. How would you get Congress moving, along with agencies like the US Army Corp of Engineers, Houston Public Works, Harris County Flood Control, FEMA and TxDOT?

Are development practices causing increased flooding?

Neither the city of Houston nor Harris County will endorse a policy for new construction to have “No Adverse Impacts,” yet that policy is endorsed by the Association of State Floodplain Managers. What is your position?

Independent mapping companies have mapped the entire country with better accuracy and resolution than FEMA has available, showing Houston as more exposed to flooding than the FEMA maps indicate. Private companies are already using these maps to better manage their risk by avoiding flood-prone areas. Should FEMA replace their outdated Flood Insurance Rate Maps with these more accurate private maps?

The City of Houston lobbied Congress to change FEMA rules to allow redevelopment of properties bought by the government due to repeated flooding. If a Professional Engineer says it won’t impact flooding, the city will allow construction in the floodway using fill dirt to elevate properties. What is your position?

The National Flood Insurance Program (“NFIP”) is insolvent. What solutions would you propose?

Houston’s economy is dependent on petrochemical plants along the ship channel, which a hurricane storm surge could seriously damage. What is your opinion on solutions like the Ike Dike or the Coastal Spine (or other) and would you actively support funding?

** Woodview Elementary is where we held our first meeting after 500 area homes flooded during an unnamed thunderstorm in 2009. Since then more impervious cover has been added to once permeable ground, more upstream and downstream development has occurred, and whole tracts of land – large and small – have been elevated, transferring water to nearby lower elevation properties. Woodview is slated to be redeveloped within a few years and RAF thinks it would be a premium site for area detention – either above or below ground.

Although the event is free and open to the public, it still costs to hold meetings like this (school rental, safety officer, media operator, etc.). Contributions are encouraged to help support the nonprofit and a hat will be passed. Further details will be posted at:

The first few questions were to establish public statements for which we will hold whoever wins accountable. No doubt they are obvious. But consider how often our elected officials and their appointees have been unwilling to admit to the most basic and obvious truths.

Some of the questions listed were loaded; that is, we put enough information in the question to hint that we wanted the candidates to come up with a nuanced answer. Question 5, for instance, talks about No Adverse Impacts (NAI) as a possible policy. What we didn’t say, but hoped the candidates would recognize, is that a policy of NAI only maintains the status quo; i.e., flooding doesn’t get worse. Anything less, ANYTHING, makes flooding worse. And we’re not even capable of establishing p0licy to stop it from making things worse.

In question 6 we pretty much answered the question, “Should FEMA replace their outdated Flood Insurance Rate Maps (FIRM’s) with these more accurate private maps?” Here’s what we said, “Independent mapping companies have mapped the entire country with better accuracy and resolution than FEMA has available, showing Houston as more exposed to flooding than the FEMA maps indicate. Private companies are already using these maps to better manage their risk by avoiding flood-prone areas.”

Of course we should look at the private sector maps – they’re done; Congress is broken; FEMA is financially broke; and there’s too much development money in local politics that’s resulted in some very bad decisions, including pulling land out of the floodplains for development. The private sector has already completed what FEMA cannot seem to get started – it’s done and it was done without developer or governmental fingers on the scales.

Question 7 pointed to one of the main causes for flooding. “The City of Houston lobbied Congress to change FEMA rules to allow redevelopment of properties bought by the government due to repeated flooding. If a Professional Engineer says it won’t impact flooding, the city will allow construction in the floodway using fill dirt to elevate properties.”

Building in a floodway absolutely should be forbidden, and it should be done on the federal level, not at the local level. A floodway is guaranteed to flood in a rain event. Anything built in the floodway will obstruct water flow and back up water upstream, causing further flooding.

Current federal (FEMA) rules say that no fill dirt can be added in the 100-year floodplain; i.e., no net fill. Dirt used to elevate structures must be scalloped out from the floodplain itself. Changing this national policy at the local level will cause additional flooding, even if a professional engineer is willing to certify that it won’t. Further, professional engineers have made some very bad analyses in several areas that we are familiar with; e.g., Pine Crest Golf Course and the Conrad-Sauer detention pond.

We had hoped Question 8 would spur a little research. “The National Flood Insurance Program (“NFIP”) is insolvent. What solutions would you propose?” Congress passed the Biggert-Waters Flood Insurance Reform Act of 2012, which established true actuarial rates for insurance that significantly raised the costs of flood insurance for at-risk properties. These property owners made so much noise that Congress repealed much of the previous Act with the Homeowner Flood Insurance Affordability Act of 2014. Point is, Congress knows that we cannot continue to subsidize risky behavior and we had hoped that our candidates would know that, too, and would have strength in their convictions.

In Question 9, we defined what is vital to our nation’s security and economy to protect: “Houston’s economy is dependent on petrochemical plants along the ship channel, which a hurricane storm surge could seriously damage.” Then in the question, we hinted that there were other solutions rather than just the Ike Dike or Coastal Spline. “What is your opinion on solutions like the Ike Dike or the Coastal Spine (or other) and would you actively support funding?”

Why did we add “other” and why is it so important to us? Because neither of the other approaches will adequately protect the jewel, the ship channel, from a storm surge. The huge storage tanks along the ship channel hold millions of gallons of toxic materials, but they are designed to hold fluids inside, not to protect against storm surge waters. Scientists and engineers say that they will likely collapse, releasing their contents and contaminating the region, creating one of the worse ecological and economic calamities the World has seen. The Rice SSPEED Center has done extensive modeling that shows there is sufficient water in the Bay so that hurricane winds can recreate the storm surge behind the Ike Dike or the Coastal Spine, meaning they wouldn’t be effective for stopping ship channel damage.

The good news is that the SSPEED Center has identified a solution and we think that it’s important for our Congressional candidates to know about that solution since they would need to vote to support it.

What if Houston’s survival depends not just on withstanding a flood, but on giving in to it?

Part 1: Overflow

Dean Bixler used to go golfing near the top of Brickhouse Gully, a neglected drainage canal, at a course called Pine Crest. It was near his house in west Houston, and not a bad place to play until it closed down a couple of years back. In the months after Hurricane Harvey, savoring his $30,000 floodproofing investment, including metal doors with gaskets that had kept water out of his house, Bixler heard from a neighbor that the golf course was being developed. The neighbor was concerned that the new subdivision would replace low-lying grass with roofs and roads and that the runoff would flood their neighborhood in a heavy rain. In Brooklyn or Boston, residents worry new neighbors will take their sunlight or their parking spaces. In Houston, the concern is new neighbors will bring flooding.

Bixler downloaded Federal Emergency Management Agency maps and found something strange. For the past decade, the entire course had sat in the 100-year flood plain—land, usually near bodies of water, that has been assessed as having a 1 percent chance of flooding every year. What that official designation means is both practical risk to the homeowner and, for anyone with a Federal Housing Administration mortgage, a potentially onerous requirement to buy flood insurance. In most places in the U.S., a flood plain encompasses beach houses and ribbons of properties along fast-rising rivers. In Houston, the 100-year clings to the bayous, gullies, and ditches that give the city its natural character and duck beneath the roads and lurk behind houses. On a map, the flood plain is to the bayous as foliage is to a branching tree. The maps Bixler pulled indicated that, according to government-approved estimates, Pine Crest golf course could be expected to sit beneath 2 feet of water during what would be called a 100-year storm.

Lisa Larson-Walker

In a city locked in a mortal battle with water, that was no small thing: That much water spread across the course (at least briefly detained, in water-management lingo) would mean that much less water flowing immediately downstream in a big storm. The water from the course would flow into Brickhouse Gully, which would in turn rush east to empty into a bigger channel, the White Oak Bayou, along which more than 8,000 houses were flooded during Harvey. But then Bixler saw the FEMA map had been revised once already, with a further revision conditionally approved—essentially showing that as long as the owner, a developer in Houston, dug a channel where the golf course’s water hazards lined up, the whole property could gradually emerge from the FEMA danger zone. The 100-year flood plain the course sat upon would, as far as the official map went, disappear.

Now the revisions made sense. The new owner, an Arizona homebuilder called Meritage Homes, could terraform the flood plain into 100 acres of dry land ready for 900 houses selling for about $400,000 a piece. Approximate revenue: $360 million. Homebuyers with FHA mortgages wouldn’t be required to buy flood insurance or grapple with the fears that come with living on a flood plain every time the sky darkened. The new houses, perched on fill more than 2 feet above the safer 500-year flood mark, were expected to stay dry in a major storm. But if the water that had once sat on the golf course went downstream, where would it end up?

Houston is as flat as a tile, and about as resistant to water. It rains a lot (more than it used to), and it rains hard (harder than before). Water ripples across the fields of concrete and tends to flow right over the raw earth, too, a clay mix called “black gumbo.” Despite the best efforts of civil engineers, the natural streambeds that carry water from the county line to Galveston Bay aren’t much bigger than they were in 1950, when this was a city of 600,000. It’s grown fourfold since then.

If the water that had once sat on the golf course went downstream, where would it endup?

Unprecedented storms have brought three straight years of biblical floods, culminating in Harvey, which inundated 154,170 homes in Harris County—the Delaware-sized area that contains the city of Houston and another Houston’s worth of people outside it. Nearly half of those houses were in neither the 100-year nor the 500-year FEMA flood plain. Why did they flood? In part because Harvey was a leviathan of a storm swollen by a carbon-thick atmosphere, a once-in-10,000-years rainfall event. The weight of the water flexed the earth’s crust and temporarily sank the city a half-inch. And the homes flooded in part because Houston, like other cities, has reshaped its natural flood plains with concrete. Human construction now decides where the floods go.

Bixler is tanned and stocky, with close-cropped, thinning hair and a goatee. He used to work as a seismic engineer in oil and gas, and he brought a sheaf of printed maps and charts to a strip-mall Starbucks to demonstrate what he perceived as the dirty tricks that had been used to extract the course from the 100-year flood plain. “It’s very clever engineering,” he told me. In his white pickup, classic rock radio on the dial, we cruised the roads around Pine Crest. It is hard to imagine a flood on a sunny day, but Bixler did his best to assist. Near the top of Brickhouse Gully, as we looked down on a still pool teeming with turtles, he smoked a cigarette and reflected on his struggle to bring the development to a halt. “To be quite honest, I wish my neighbor had never shown me this. I’ve lost faith in the city,” he said. “It makes me ill that the people supposed to be protecting us, Harris County Flood Control, is helping these guys.”

In November of last year, shortly after Bixler dug up the flood maps, Meritage sought city approval for a special tax district to develop Pine Crest. Two months after Harvey, the prospect of a flood-prone 18-hole golf course on the upper watershed being paved into a thousand driveways was treated as a scandal. The editorial board of the Houston Chroniclewrote, “Our city can no longer tolerate a civic philosophy that insists on construction at any cost. We can no longer allow developers to treat our city as their playground for profit. … A natural sponge for floodwater would be transformed into a concrete pipeline that drains right into Buffalo Bayou.” And it was all happening along Brickhouse Gully, where, to avert future flood damage, the city had bought out 30 homes before Harvey and wanted to buy 15 more. Now, just uphill, it was enabling the construction of 900 more.

The outcry managed to postpone the vote, but little more—in April, the city gave the same proposal a unanimous go-ahead. Not everyone thought this was the best use of one of the largest remaining single infill parcels in the city. “If the Flood Control District had been able to purchase that land, I’d be designing and planning to construct a large detention basin in that area,” said Matt Zeve, the director of operations for the Harris County Flood Control District. By August, Pine Crest was well on its way to becoming Spring Brook Village, a project that embodies the challenges that Houston faces as it confronts an existential question: Did the city build its way into cataclysm?

Part 2: Terraform

On Aug. 25—the one-year anniversary of Harvey’s landfall—an astounding 85 percent of Harris County voters approved a $2.5 billion bond issue to fight flooding. It’s the largest bond issue in the history of Texas’ largest county and, everyone agrees, long-awaited recognition of the dangers that Houston faces. The support is a testament to how deep an impression the storm has left; it will quadruple the Flood Control District’s annual budget.

On a recent night, a friend took me to a party in west Houston where an older couple was celebrating the move back into their house, nearly a year after Buffalo Bayou came in through their back door. It was a hot, still night, but you couldn’t hear the stream through the woods, let alone see it—or, for that matter, imagine this group of older Houstonians in polo shirts launching kayaks out their garage doors, through brown water rushing in rapids over submerged pickup trucks.

Melissa Ramirez tells Edward Ramirez the status of their flooded home on Sept. 1, 2017, after she returned to it by canoe for the first time since Harvey floodwaters arrived in Houston.

Rick Wilking/Reuters

Among the Harvey survivors I met were Patti and R.J. Simon; last August was the fifth time their ranch house on Brays Bayou had flooded. They waded to a neighbor’s elevated home. Then they finally moved. At 75, Patti told me she was done with the routine that had accompanied the years in their house since Tropical Storm Allison in 2001. Done putting the couch up on the kitchen counter each time they saw a bad forecast—and too old for it besides. So they left the neighborhood they’d known for decades, where Patti could walk to her job teaching French at the high school, and friends from church could come by and help move the boxes in and out every time the water came in the door. They lost the door frame where they measured the kids. This wasn’t their children’s main concern. “They would have committed us to asylum had we stayed,” she said. Harvey was their third flood in three years.

The Simons aren’t alone: Homes that once flooded rarely, if ever, are suddenly flooding more. The flood plains are on the march, creeping inland from surging bayous. All three of the conduits below Pine Crest—Brickhouse to White Oak to Buffalo, a double-play combination that drains this stretch of northwest Houston—are among the 12 fastest-rising urban waterways in the state of Texas. Since records began more than 50 years ago, Buffalo Bayou’s peak flows are up 250 percent. Brickhouse Gully’s peak is up nearly 400 percent. And White Oak Bayou, over a slightly longer time frame, is up nearly 600 percent. That doesn’t include Harvey, said watershed scientist and consultant Matthew Berg, who published the data. “Pretty much all the time, development is a piece of it,” he asserted. “It’s just a question of how much.” Two in three Houstonians believe lax regulations have made the city’s flooding problems worse.

Dean Bixler is one of them. The house where he and his wife live was built in 1960. It has now flooded three times, all in the past decade. What changed? He pointed to a giant, raised shopping center up the hill. It’s hard to prove these things, but Bixler felt it was obvious: The project had displaced scores of acre-feet (an acre-foot is an acre of water, 1 foot deep), some of which had wound up in his living room. Three times in 10 years. He lost two cars, and, like many people in Houston, he has learned to park up the block, on higher ground. (A joke I heard, which might not be a joke, was that the highest points in Houston are the soaring ramps of highway interchanges.)

Bixler saw in the Pine Crest development a supercharged version of his domestic battle. It wasn’t even in his watershed. But with 900 homes on a little more than 100 acres, Pine Crest was to be among the largest infill projects in the city of Houston, an irresistible morsel for builders and a red flag for wary residents. A Meritage executive said last spring to the Houston Business Journal, “What we saw was the biggest opportunity available in the city in terms of one tract of land.”

Members of Residents Against Flooding, including Bixler, allege that the map revisions distort how and where the water flows. The revisions were prepared by local hydrological engineers working for the site’s previous owners, MetroNational, and certified by the Harris County Flood Control District on behalf of FEMA. The 2007 map shows the golf course could be under roughly 200 acre-feet of water during a 100-year storm; as the developers carve a channel through the property, removing the banks from the 100-year flood plain, some of that water appears to go missing.

The course has been closed for only a couple of years, but in the tropical climate it has rapidly reverted to nature, with black-eyed Susans and dense scrub filling the fairways between stands of pine. It won’t be wild for long. At the low end is the wide grass halfpipe that will one day funnel runoff from 900 driveways into Brickhouse Gully, part of what Meritage says will be a state-of-the-art drainage-and-detention system that will actually improve conditions downstream relative to the old golf course. On sunny days, it will double as a lovely water feature along which residents can walk their dogs and ride bicycles. To pay for it and other improvements, Meritage got the city to approve a “special utility district,” a geographic tax assessment that will allow a $280 million infrastructure bond issue to be paid off through buyers’ future property tax bills. (It’s a way to pass costs onto buyers.) At the high end, the trees have been felled, and grassless fill rises from the street to escape the 500-year flood mark. Two-story homes, modest and with little flair, are open for tours.

The Harris County Flood Control District, for its part, has looked into all of this at the behest of Residents Against Flooding and stands by its certification of the work by the developers’ engineers. According to Todd Ward, a risk specialist and hydrologist at the Flood Control District, the revisions are just more accurate than the maps from 2007. (After complaints, the agency did its own analysis to verify this.) “When you look at it in more detail, you find there’s a lot more high ground than you might think. The actual volume stored on the site is quite a bit less than [what the 2007 map implies].” The new channel would be deep enough to bring the adjoining land safely out of the 100-year flood plain. The agency also promises that the Meritage development plan will have “no adverse impact” on water levels downstream, meaning that any flooding should be the same or less than if the development weren’t there.

“There’s no question that the amount of impervious surface … has impacted the amount of runoff andflooding.”— Shannon Van Zandt

In normal times, the complaints of neighborhood cranks might not be worth much against the word of the county’s hydrological authorities. But confidence in local water guardians is not high. Thousands of plaintiffs whose houses flooded during Harvey have filed suit against the Army Corps of Engineers, which runs the city’s two giant dams, for flooding their homes without warning by releasing water from the reservoirs as they neared capacity.

Meanwhile, the Harris County Flood Control District insists that the past three decades of new development have not caused more flooding—a view that is not widely shared. “People have always said the guy upstream of me is making me flood,” Zeve, of the Flood Control District, told me. “That has been a common theme throughout Houston history and always will be. No one is going to deny that development increases the volume of water, but detention regulates the peak flow.” Not just in theory: Zeve said the agency’s watchful eye has successfully mitigated the effects of new development since the early 1990s. To prove it, the agency has commissioned a peer-reviewed investigation of its own detention requirements (otherwise, he notes with some self-awareness, no one would believe them), and preliminary results suggest their requirements are effective. The city’s recurring flood issues, he argued, can be attributed to huge storms hitting a city largely built before anyone knew what a flood plain was.

Several experts I spoke to found that suggestion—that new development was not having an effect on flooding—ridiculous. As Houston has sprawled westward over the Katy Prairie, 75 percent of its flood-absorbent grasslands have been paved over, turning natural detention basins into roads and houses. In Brays Bayou, on the south side of the city, Rice environmental engineering professor Philip Bedient has found that rainfall is up 26 percent over the past 40 years—but runoff is up 204 percent. From 1996 to 2011, impervious surface in Harris County increased by a quarter, and from 1992 to 2010, the area lost almost a third of its wetlands—nearly 16,000 acres. It’s a correlation that’s been noted again and again. “There’s no question that the amount of impervious surface and the destruction of natural ecosystem surfaces has impacted the amount of runoff and flooding that we have seen,” said Shannon Van Zandt, the head of the landscape architecture and urban planning department at Texas A&M. “There’s no question about that. I don’t think it’s plausible to suggest that the detention is taking care of the issue.”

Critics say the system is built to approve more housing, not deliver objective science. Engineers who sign off on developments, assuring the public they will not contribute to flooding, bid for work from developers, who hire engineers who can make things pencil out. Those houses inside the dam basins whose owners are suing the Army Corps? Certification work for some of those projects was done by an engineering firm run by Houston’s current flood czar, Steve Costello. His firm was so deep in the trade that, when later elected councilman, he had to recuse himself “from more than 60 matters involving his firm, including city flood-control contracts and reviews of municipal utility district deals spread across the region,” according to an investigation in the Houston Chronicle.

Jim Blackburn, an environmental lawyer and professor in the Rice Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, thinks the county must find a way to end this cozy relationship between engineers and their dual masters, developers and (according to state licensing) the public. One step would be to prohibit the types of flood plain map revisions that the developers had undertaken at Pine Crest. And then some. “As far as I’m concerned, Pine Crest proves the larger point, that we don’t have proper respect for the flood plain. We’re going to have to turn land over to water. Water will demand space in this city whether we like it or not.”

Part 3: Progress

Judge Ed Emmett, the chief executive of Harris County and most powerful politician in the region, agrees: “We’re not going to build our way out of this problem.” The saga over the development of Pine Crest is a Houston city issue, Emmett emphasized, but he said candidly: “It has been a mess.”

In the year since Harvey, the Republican has emerged as a born-again advocate for better flood control. He said Harris County has the strictest building codes and flood plain regulations in the country. It was his decision to schedule the bond issue for the one-year anniversary of Harvey. “When was the last time you saw 85 percent for anything?” he asked the crowd at a supporters’ gathering Saturday night. He’s criticized the way development was conducted for decades (some of it on his watch). Though a champion of the Grand Parkway, the outermost western beltway under construction, Emmett talked conservation at a forum in February: “We need to completely protect the Katy Prairie,” he said of the great plain in western Harris County. “Just set it aside and not touch it.”

There are signs of awakening in the city, too. First Harris County, and then Houston, mandated that all structures in the 500-year flood plain must be built 2 feet above the base flood elevation. The “zero net fill” rule forces all 500-year flood plain builders to dig an equivalent hole for every hill they construct. That’s among the strictest city building codes in the nation, in a place so famous for freewheeling construction that the British architecture critic Reyner Banham compared it to “a real-life Monopoly game.” It’s a recognition that, on this coastal plain, deep into the Anthropocene era, the FEMA maps no longer accurately describe what happens on the ground. (When FEMA updates its maps, the city will revisit those elevation rules.) During Harvey, Houston buildings in the 500-year flood plain were damaged at a slightly higher rate than those in the 100-year flood plain. Now the city has essentially quashed the distinction.

“Of all the flood disasters I’ve lived through, this one seems to be creating more change than in the past,” said Sam Brody, a planner who served on the National Academy of Sciences committee on urban flooding in the United States. Two feet at the 500-year level was not even on the table last year. “I was saying 2 feet freeboard at the 100-year level a year ago and people were saying, ‘You crazy academic, that’s never going to happen.’ ”

The homebuilders got their concessions, though. Rather than force builders to elevate structures above the flood line on stilts, the city permitted slab foundations on raised, compacted soil so long as the builder could demonstrate water flows didn’t change. This is a good thing, argues Marvin Odum, the former president of Shell Oil who was appointed Houston’s chief recovery officer after Harvey. “You basically have free rein as long as you don’t alter how water moves off of that property,” he said.

A home is surrounded by floodwater after Harvey’s torrential rains pounded southeast Texas in late August 2017.

Scott Olson/Getty Images

That’s how Meritage is doing it: houses on mounds, not stilts. While Meritage says all that fill is coming from digging out the property, it’s not obligated to do so under pre-Harvey 500-year requirements. Before the developer received its April go-ahead to create its utility district, the company did extensive outreach with the city council and residents downstream, according to Robert Moore, a vice president of land development at Meritage. “They should feel assured,” he said, “because it’s been checked, double-checked, triple-checked to make sure we aren’t going to have a negative impact on them at all.” Meritage says—and the Flood Control District agrees—that with the carved-out channel and associated ponds, the development will hold more water upstream than the golf course did. The company also suggested that the drainage work it had done before Harvey might have alleviated flooding on Brickhouse Gully, where 2,300 homes were inundated last August.

On approving the utility district, Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner cited the Meritage project as proof that the city’s new code would not scare off the homebuilders who have made the Bayou City a uniquely affordable American metropolis.

The downstream residents are victims. They’re also part of theproblem.

The chief risk facing Houston and Harris County is not the vulnerability of new developments, which do tend to be built higher, better, and upstream, but that of the older houses downstream, many built low to the ground and served by undersize storm drains. It may not be the case that your new neighbor upstream is making you flood. But the standards could be higher. Activists say the choice between an abandoned, flood-prone golf course and a subdivision of 900 homes was a false one. Susan Chadwick, the executive director of Save Buffalo Bayou, a group that opposes development in and around the river, argued in June that the city should have used eminent domain on the course to create a detention pond that would relieve Brickhouse Gully.

The engineers at the Flood Control District don’t disagree it would have been a good place for a pool. As we sat in his office going over flood plains, Todd Ward conceded it was a bit of a missed opportunity. We found the course on an enormous satellite map of Houston on the wall. In a giant city, it’s a small square. But there aren’t many undeveloped parcels of that size left. Some of the just-approved $2.5 billion bond will go toward buying out existing repeat-flooding homes downstream of the newly elevated houses at Spring Brook Village. The bond calls for $35 million of channel improvements to Brickhouse Gully to reduce the risk to 1,300 homes.

No matter how much care is put into terraforming, the development will dump more water into the flooded channels than it would had it become a giant detention pond instead. “You can literally measure this thing in gallons going into someone’s living room,” said Albert Pope, a professor of architecture at Rice. “There’s a way to get to fewer gallons.” Pope is one of a growing number of architects, planners, and engineers who argue for an anti-flooding plan that looks not just at what will be built (building codes, detention requirements) but also at what has been built. Those downstream residents are victims. They’re also part of the problem. He is working on a blueprint for a phased retreat of the 100,000 Houston structures that lie within the city’s 100-year flood plain. The bond was a good sign. But he added, “We are close to the end of engineering fixes.”

To John Jacob, a wetland scientist and director of the Texas Coastal Watershed Program, Houston’s long-term strategy must simply be to evacuate the 100-year flood plain. It’s the equivalent of demolishing a midsize American city. “It would be traumatic. It’s not something that should be taken quickly. But it ought to be a goal.” He believes that the city’s bayous, if restored to their full storm-surge size and shorn of encroaching roads and houses, have the capacity to handle another Harvey. That land could be appropriated as a series of linear green spaces akin to D.C.’s Rock Creek Park, with trails, fields, gardens, and paths. It’s an enhanced version of the city’s Bayou Greenways 2020 project, a $220 million investment to assemble a 150-mile network of hiking and biking trails. Houston is not a walkable city, but on the trail that winds along White Oak Bayou, cyclists and joggers share space in the sunken green bend of the floodway. Egrets alight by the water. It’s a glimpse of a Houston where the bayou is something to be loved, not feared.

A man carries salvaged food from his flooded two story home in Spring, Texas, a northern suburb of Houston in August last year.PHOTO:MICHAEL WYKE/EPA/SHUTTERSTOCK

HOUSTON—A year to the day since Hurricane Harvey slammed into Texas, Houston area residents are set to vote on whether to overhaul the region’s beleaguered flood-protection system, an election that local officials have cast as critical to the area’s future.

On the ballot in Harris County is a $2.5 billion bond backed by property taxes that could more than quadruple the annual funding available to help shield Houston and the surrounding cities from flooding. The proposal, set for a special election on Aug. 25, is the largest bond measure ever offered in Texas’ most populous county. If approved, proceeds from the bond would help fund a range of projects aimed at significantly bolstering the area’s aging network of bayous, which serve as a drainage system for the flood-prone county.

At stake, public officials say, is whether Harris County can ever realistically hope to protect itself from another storm of Harvey’s might.

“It is the most important local vote in my lifetime,” said Judge Ed Emmett, the county’s chief executive and one of the architects of the measure. “If Harvey came next week, we’d be in a world of hurt.”

The storm caused 36 flood-related deaths in Harris County and flooded more than 159,000 homes, apartments and other dwellings, while also damaging thousands of commercial structures and businesses. But even before Harvey hit, some officials and experts had warned that flooding was going to worsen in the Houston area and that upgrading an antiquated drainage system would be costly.

Local officials said increased funding would allow the county to finally complete flood-prevention projects that have been slowed because of a lack of money, as well as take additional measures it otherwise couldn’t afford. More than 200 potential projects have been identified including the widening of bayous, repairing flood-damaged infrastructure and buying out more than 1,000 flood-risk homes.

Matt Zeve, director of operations for the Harris County Flood Control District, said some of the projects the county could finish could have helped thousands of homes flooded during Harvey. If the proposal is approved by voters, the flood control district’s annual budget could rise to more than $500 million from $120 million, he said.

There is also the possibility of getting matching federal funds for projects the county can pursue if the bond measure passes, Mr. Zeve said.

According to county estimates, the bond proposal would increase the total property tax by no more than 1.4% for most homeowners in Harris County.

Weathering the Storm: Struggles Continue After Hurricane Harvey

When disaster strikes, having a safety net like flood insurance, a stable income, or savings can mean the difference between getting back on your feet, and living every day among the wreckage. We profile two families in Houston still recovering from Hurricane Harvey six months after the storm.

“There is literally a case of countywide PTSD to this day over Harvey,” he said. “I will talk to someone after a meeting, and they will be visibly emotional, crying in front of me. This is very emotional topic for people here.”

The measure has largely generated bipartisan support. Judge Emmett is a Republican, while Sylvester Turner, Houston’s Democratic mayor, also backs the bond. Gov. Greg Abbott, a conservative Republican who has called for reducing property taxes, approved the county’s request to hold the emergency special bond election, a requirement of state law.

Kaaren Cambio, whose home flooded during Harvey, said she at first had concerns that the public wouldn’t be given enough of a say on how the money was spent. But after attending a community meeting, Ms. Cambio, who heads a flooding task force for the Harris County GOP, said those concerns were allayed.

“I am never for higher taxes but in this case, this bond is necessary,” she said.

Roger Gingell, general counsel, for Residents Against Flooding, a Houston group that advocates for flood prevention measures, said that while he planned to vote for the bond, he had concerns about what projects the money would be used for. Mr. Gingell said he wanted the county to take a more nuanced approach to flood prevention in areas that it had not previously focused on, in addition to emphasizing some of the same bayou widening projects it had in years’ past.

Flood victims are evacuated as floodwaters from Harvey rise in Houston in August last year.PHOTO: DAVID J. PHILLIP/ASSOCIATED PRESS

“It’s pretty clear that we need the money to fund flood prevention infrastructure, but the government at both the city and county level has never articulated a big picture strategy for flooding in the region,” he said.

Charles Goforth, president of the Brays Bayou Association, a residential group that works on flood prevention issues and represents 30,000 homes in an area of Houston hit hard by Harvey, said most people he has spoken to are supportive of the proposal.

While some are uneasy with letting local government lead the flood prevention effort, Mr. Goforth said those fears have been eclipsed by an acknowledgment that since Harvey, there’s no longer much of a choice.

“We live here and this is a situation we’re going to have to keep dealing with. So we have to bite the bullet,” he said.

Appeared in the August 6, 2018, print edition as ‘Houston To Vote On Flood Protection.’

]]>RAF – Supreme Court Petition for Writ of Certiorarihttp://drainagecoalition.com/?p=1418
Wed, 27 Jun 2018 02:22:48 +0000http://drainagecoalition.com/?p=1418...Read the Rest]]>In RAF litigation, there is a narrow, but possible, path to Supreme Court review. In the panel decision, the Fifth Circuit determined that the City and TIRZ 17 had a rational basis for transferring the flooding blight from TIRZ 17 to the neighborhoods (and that thus there is no viable 14th Amendment claim). However, RAF’s Complaint contained numerous and specific allegations that no rational basis existed (such as references to City-approved flood studies that gave defendants actual knowledge their infrastructure projects would worsen flooding in the residential areas). Under established law, on a motion to dismiss, a reviewing court must accept all well pled facts as true, viewing them in the light most favorable to Plaintiffs. This standard comes from the Supreme Court’s well known Iqbal and Twombly cases. In the context of RAF’s lawsuit, the Fifth Circuit did not accept the alleged facts as true but made its own determination that a rational basis existed, despite there having been no fact development in the lower court. In fact, the rational basis articulated by the Fifth Circuit was not only speculative and evidence-free, it was contrary to all the facts pled in RAF’s complaint.

As it turns out, this collision of the Iqbal/Twombly standard with a reviewing court finding rational basis at the motion to dismiss stage has been analyzed in a 2014 law review article, Rational Basis and the 12(b)(6) Motion: An Unnecessary Perplexity, published in the George Mason University Civil Rights Law Journal by Timothy Sandefur. Interestingly, some of the pitfalls associated with this collision played out in RAF’s case. For example, the City and TIRZ argued that the appropriate standard under the rational basis test required RAF to “negate any conceivably rational basis” for the defendants’ actions (see TIRZ Reply at 16). But as Mr. Sandefur explains, the rational basis test does not create the “logically impossible task of proving an infinite set of negatives or overcoming fanciful conjectures” (article at p.45). The standard urged by the City and TIRZ has been articulated by some courts at the 12(b)(6) stage, but other courts have stated that this burden on plaintiffs is too great, permitting those cases to move past motions to dismiss. The law review article illustrates that this collision plays out in cases across all circuit courts, and provides extensive case law research demonstrating the current state of the problem.

Moreover, right now, there is a petition for writ of certiorari pending with the Supreme Court, Niang v. Tomblinson, challenging the evidentiary standard to overcome rational basis review. Several amicus briefs were filed, including one by Mr. Sandefur. His amicus brief describes conflicting case law over whether rational basis is a “rebuttable” “presumption of fact” or whether judges may manufacture their own speculative rationalizations without fact development in the case. That description of course applies to the error underlying RAF’s Fifth Circuit decision. What this means is that the issue presented in RAF’s case is current, timely, and more likely to resonate with the high court if there are multiple requests for review based on similar fact patterns. Further, Supreme Court review often requires the presence of a “circuit split” (conflicting authority among the various circuit courts), which may be present for this aspect of rational basis review, in light of some of the cases discussed in the Niang v. Tomblinson briefing.

Here, the purpose of this write-up is not to supply the set of cases that would support a petition for writ of certiorari, but rather describe the issue that presents the best path for Supreme Court review. Our goal for further review is two-fold: first, we strongly believe that the Fifth Circuit erred, and should not have allowed dismissal of the lawsuit on a 12(b)(6) motion in light of the detailed narrative and extensive facts alleged in the Complaint (which should have been taken as true, per Iqbal/Twombly). The Fifth Circuit should have allowed fact development. Second, we are mindful that the litigation pressure on the City and TIRZ 17 may be keeping projects on the CIPs. In that regard, we observe that positive adjustments were made to the CIP in the weeks preceding Fifth Circuit oral argument.

We would not propose to file a petition for writ of certiorari with no merit. We recognize that the path is always narrow to the Supreme Court, but we also believe it is significant that the issue causing dismissal of RAF’s lawsuit has been identified and analyzed broadly, and that a rational basis case, where evidentiary issues are at play, is currently pending before the Supreme Court for review.

——

Mary Conner

Irvine & Conner

RAF NOTES:

A rational basis has to be a lawful basis. This point is so fundamental it is not often raised in these cases.

If lawfulness is not a prerequisite for a government rational basis almost ANY unlawful government activity can be justified! Rational basis under the argument that it raised the value of the TIRZ (but transferred their flooding to adjacent neighborhoods) would allow any unlawful abuse to be rationalized. Was Hitler was right: he had a rational basis!

The TIRZ did not deliberately flood us (hopefully); that is not a rational or designed basis. It was flooding which the TIRZ knowingly and intentionally caused but it was not part of a written plan in which the public had a right to participate. There was no rational basis. Collateral damage and especially not recklessly or intentionally caused collateral damage is not a rational basis.

For those concerned that our case is the same as Niang – it is not. Niang is a licensing case. We do not want a license and are not being deprived because of a state requirement that we needed to comply with. But the test as to how much lower courts should be bound by factual evidence and in 12b6 assumed factual evidence is certainly crucial. The Supreme Court lately has not taken that many purely legal cases except for Chevron deference cases. It does like flooding cases. Maybe it will take this one. It takes four justices to decide.

ABUSE OF DISCRETION STANDARD OF REVIEW. One other thing. You have to pick a standard of review for each question taken up on appeal; the SCOTUS does not have to grant cert for each question. The idea that RAF was trying to get in line before the later Harvey flood victims is an example of abuse of discretion not supported by any evidence in the record. Rarely do judges commit an error that is so fundamental that it is an abuse of discretion. Here is a case. Our attorneys had no way of knowing that the appellate court would latch onto the same patently impossible and outrageous assertion as that of the trial judge when the trial judge was supposed to be assuming our facts were correct and not making findings of her own, so they did not pick the trial opinion apart. It’s unimaginable that it would be repeated on appeal, so it was not raised on appeal. It is a legal standard to be raised now.

Residents Against Flooding (RAF) agrees with him that Tax Increment Redevelopment Zone (TIRZ) 17 can be an agent of change for the neighborhoods surrounding it. In fact, RAF believes it is the only entity with the monetary and engineering resources to fix the problems created by “development on steroids” fostered by easy access to property tax dollars.

When District A CM Stardig was defeated by Helena Brown, just as Nichols says, TIRZ 17 was purged of several of its bad players and neighborhood representatives were selected to replace them. Even though those representatives were outvoted 5 to 2 at nearly every meeting, there was still a substantial and welcome shift in the direction of the TIRZ.

During CM Brown’s tenure, a Capital Improvement Projects (CIP) plan was adopted by the TIRZ that provided much needed detention and bayou improvements. Placeholders were inserted for not yet identified detention projects that would benefit all neighborhoods south of I-10, including Nichols’. There were new efforts to work together to move these projects forward.

Unfortunately, CM Stardig defeated Helena Brown in the subsequent election and immediately began undoing some of the positive aspects of the “new” TIRZ.

Metro National proposed rebuilding the 62-acre-foot Conrad-Sauer detention pond adjacent to property they were redeveloping. It would be remade into a public park, Matthewson Road would be extended to Gessner with a bridge installed across the detention pond, and most importantly 44 acre-feet of detention would be added. Tenants of the new development wouldn’t have to look at an unsightly concrete lined hole in the ground, increasing the value of their property.

Because of the added detention, TIRZ 17 would pay for the work. Because Metro National was redeveloping the land anyway, they would perform the design and construction. They would donate land for the road extension. State and local officials touted it as a “Win, win, win!”

Unfortunately, the promise to add 44 acre-feet of detention wasn’t true. The engineering firm used by TIRZ 17 to substantiate these claims was also designing the Conrad-Sauer detention pond for Metro National. They claimed “water couldn’t get into the pond” so it was only working to half capacity. During the flood of 2015, power to the pond’s pumps failed and it overfilled, proving absolutely that water could get into the pond.

One of the two new neighborhood representatives, Reverend Bob Tucker, pointed to this conflict of interest and asked that they be removed as TIRZ engineers. This incensed Metro National’s CEO who coerced the City (Andy Icken and CM Stardig) to remove Rev. Tucker from the TIRZ Board.

Meanwhile a more cost effective 84 acre-feet of detention identified near Westview and Gessner was tied up in review by the City until removed from consideration by its owner. The Capital Improvement Projects plan installed under CM Brown was cancelled and a TIRZ Board committee was formed to write a new one.

RAF had suspended its lawsuit while TIRZ 17 was actively working with us. Frustrated by these changes and the loss of Reverend Tucker as our representative, RAF filed suit in federal court in May of 2016. Shortly after that, TIRZ 17 reinstated the cancelled Capital Improvement Projects plan.

At the time, Nichols was a member of the RAF Board, but soon resigned to focus on his role as head of the Frostwood Drainage Committee.

In his new role, Nichols identified a bold strategy – he would work with the TIRZ 17 Board while RAF applied pressure through our lawsuit. Nichols and RAF Chair, Ed Browne, had several breakfast meetings discussing the strategy. Nichols was clear that without the lawsuit, TIRZ 17 probably wouldn’t work with him.

Why bring this to light now? There are several reasons:

First, in its Motion To Dismiss (MTD) our lawsuit, TIRZ 17 attorneys called our suit moot because the reinstated Capital Improvements Projects plan had everything that we had asked for. This was disingenuous.

Revealed at last month’s TIRZ Board meeting and independently confirmed by RAF, TIRZ 17 will need to extend its tenure 7-10 years in order to pay for the projects in the Capital Improvement Projects plan.

Generated for RAF by a well-respected CPA, revenue estimates for the year TIRZ 17 would normally expire, 2029, are over $28 million. Extend the TIRZ by 10 years and we’re talking about 100’s of millions of dollars.

Meanwhile, TIRZ lawsuit strategy seems to be divide and conquer by appealing to one area’s self-preservation rather than protection for the whole area. Projects scheduled for years where Reverend Tucker was the Board representative are at a standstill while newer projects are moving forward rapidly.

While we agree with the two-pronged strategy, RAF is not the villain. Moreover, RAF contends that without a strong lawsuit, neighborhoods around TIRZ 17 would only see minimal flooding relief.

It’s important to note that Mayor Turner has made no secret of his desire to shut down the handful of rich TIRZ’s and use their money to pay down City debt. Noteworthy, a few weeks ago Auggie Campbell explained how TIRZ’s are useful to get around the revenue cap.

But what if there wasn’t a revenue cap? When we elected Mayor Turner we tacitly agreed to honor part of his campaign platform – If he solved the pension problem, voters would remove the revenue cap. On this November’s ballot, he will ask Houstonians to do just that – to remove the revenue cap.

Trouble is, without a revenue cap, the Mayor can capture TIRZ money and not be penalized for it, ending any hope for our timely flood relief. Even if TIRZ 17 gets its extension, it’s clearly subject to the whims of present and future politicians and TIRZ Board members.

]]>Missing linkshttp://drainagecoalition.com/?p=1315
Sun, 30 Apr 2017 17:54:05 +0000http://drainagecoalition.com/?p=1315...Read the Rest]]>DropBox has eliminated its Public folder, which we used to link a number of our documents and pictures to our website. No data has been lost, however, every link must be replaced. Given that RAF is a nonprofit with no paid employees, all web maintenance is by volunteers.

If you find an article with broken links that you want to read, please send a message to drainage.coalition@gmail.com with the address of the broken link (right click, copy link location, paste into your email) and we will make it a priority to fix.

Hear the scientific truth about Houston’s urban, preventable flooding. No political spin. No media spin. Just facts from Dr. Sam Brody, PH.D., professor at Texas A&M Galveston, who is conducting research for FEMA on how to alleviate urban flooding across the United States.

Floodplains are changing. Areas that never flooded are flooding. Flood insurance is rising. New development could mean your home is next. Dr. Brody believes the biggest driver of this urban flood problem is human development.

Bring your friends and share the news of this free event. Come for straight talk, get straight answers from an expert in environmental studies.

Residents Against Flooding – DONATIONS ARE TAX DEDUCTIBLE

www.ResidentsAgainstFlooding.org

Email: drainage.coalition@gmail.com

www.facebook.com/RAFHouston

Twitter: @HoustonRAF

Urban Flooding is no Urban Legend. It’s a real horror story.

]]>Support for Detention Basin Ahttp://drainagecoalition.com/?p=1226
Fri, 10 Mar 2017 12:53:23 +0000http://drainagecoalition.com/?p=1226...Read the Rest]]>RAF has a fiduciary duty to support all of our membership. That includes informing residents that the CIP project for detention under the Spring Branch Memorial Sports Association ball fields on Attingham is still in flux. With this letter found in the Board packet from the February 2017, TIRZ 17 Board meeting, TIRZ 17 has reopened their attempts to install detention along Buffalo Bayou, targeting two areas specifically: “Lakeside Country and Old Farm.” Since large open detention is almost always less costly than chambered underground detention, the TIRZ 17 CIP project (T-1735) is still in play.

We sent this message to our iContact list on March 8, 2017. It’s included herein with additional links and typo corrections.

RAF Supports Frostwood in its Plea for Detention

The President of Frostwood’s Community Improvement Association, Mitchell Winkler, recently wrote a letter urging support of the Mayor, City Council and TIRZ 17 Board for TIRZ Capital Improvement Project (CIP) T-1735, known as Detention Basin A (“A” for Addingham). Promised for years, RAF agrees that this pond needs to be built post haste.

Any detention, anywhere, is desperately needed. However, there are concerns and a backstory you should know. For example, Detention Basin A is next door to brand new, mega-sized complexes, near Mac Haik Ford, that have no provision for their own stormwater run-off. Their water has no place to go. Is it realistic to believe that this basin is being built for residents of Frostwood and nearby?

Or is it more realistic that the added water detention is planned to service the new developments, and the TIRZ – once again – is not providing a real solution for your flooding. Detention Basin A will only put us back to square one, serving the storm water needs of the new development. We’ll need more.

TIRZ 17 devotes all of fiscal year 2018 to the acquisition of the land for Basin A and fiscal years 2018 and 2019 are devoted to building it. Total costs of Basin A are listed as $28M.

Water may be piped from as far away as Barryknoll. And estimated costs for conveyance under Kingsride and Frostwood to the basin will be about $9M, but won’t be finished until 2021.

How much of the estimated 240 acre-feet of needed detention will this basin hold?

Since Detention Basin A has insufficient capacity by itself, the same 2017-2021 CIP includes a second pond, Detention Basin B, where “B” stands for Bendwood. This pond only has $750,000 assigned in fiscal year 2021 for Planning. That’s four years away. How many times will you flood unnecessarily before it is actually constructed?

Given the number of times TIRZ projects have been reordered or rescinded, can you afford to rely upon their promise to keep this placeholder? Do you have any recourse if they don’t? If words don’t turn into action, RAF’s lawsuit will be the only leverage that we have.

In the meantime, TIRZ drawings have surfaced that seem to indicate the Memorial Drive project will receive water from the commercial properties in the southwestern corner of the TIRZ. Where will this water go? The Army Corps of Engineers says Buffalo Bayou cannot hold any more run-off. If so, the why is LAN studying detention on the Bayou?

Included in the TIRZ 17 Board packet, but not discussed during the meeting was a letter to Chair Ann Givens from LAN, the firm designing the detention basin. The letter was a proposal for modeling three or four detention basins along Buffalo Bayou, then comparing them to the Detention Basin A to determine which alternative is the most cost-effective.

RAF believes the most effective solution is the one that saves the most homes from flooding and has the highest probability of actually getting built.

In the same letter, to Chair Givens, LAN disclosed that they had included a “north-south hydraulic connection beneath IH-10 located west of Gessner Road” in their 2014 Regional Drainage Study (RDS) Update. “This connection was evaluated as part of the RDS Update to provide relief for the area north of IH-10 in the proximity of Gessner.”

This is where the new Metro National development is located. (The MN development is adding its water to the existing, over-taxed Conrad-Sauer Basin. And your taxpayer money is paying to beautify it for their tenants.)

In the letter, LAN says that since new detention was added under Mathewson Road, the new pipe wasn’t necessary and therefore will reduce “the required mitigation detention required on Buffalo Bayou.”

Mathewson Road drains the Metro Nation property, then dumps its water into the Conrad-Sauer Basin where it’s pumped into an overflowing IH-10 system. Where will the water discharge when the three Conrad-Sauer pumps turn on?

RAF is concerned that there may have been other “hidden” pipes modeled in the RDS that skewed Study results or protected specific developer’s properties. We wonder if the water levels at the corner of Gessner and IH-10 would have been significantly higher without the pipe. Now more water is captured in the Conrad-Sauer basin – more water on the IH-10 feeder roads with nowhere to go.

While RAF supports Frostwood’s pleas for detention, we also warn that this TIRZ continues to operate in a less than transparent manner.

In closing:

Please remember that both the north side and south side of IH-10 are connected by underground pipes. A holistic solution to prevent flooding down to Buffalo Bayou must also include detention ponds in north side locations like the Spring Branch ISD bus barn or Haden Park. Land acquisition costs are high, so parks and public facilities make ideal locations for detention ponds.

The TIRZ timeline of years on end for a single detention pond is unacceptable. Why so long, so they can yank it away at the last minute as they have done before with other projects? One city contract – 13 years ago – promised to build several basins, north and south of I-10. Nothing was ever built. This is one reason to continue to support our lawsuit – so they can’t continue to break contracts – promises.

Moving more water into a flood-prone region is unacceptable. Spending any part of the anti-flooding budget to help CityCentre tear down a parking garage or beautifying a detention pond is unacceptable.

While supporting Frostwood’s request for a basin, RAF argues that a single detention pond is unacceptable. And it’s certainly unacceptable if it is used to detain storm water run-off for buildings that should have legally paid for their own.

The TIRZ has the resources to do so much more. Let’s stop thinking so small.

This is what we must advocate for:

A holistic solution with multiple detention ponds both north and south of IH-10 with no subsidies to developers until the flooding problem is solved!

Residents Against Flooding (“RAF”), the only group with a citywide focus working to stop preventable flooding, invites you to a public informational meeting June 29th. Several attorneys will be present to speak and answer questions about Houston’s severe man-made flooding problem as well as provide information about RAF’s federal lawsuit against the City of Houston and Memorial City TIRZ 17.

Speakers include RAF Chairman, Ed Browne, an engineer, who will explain the goals of the organization in the federal lawsuit and the need for immediate action by the City. Attorneys scheduled to attend include prominent environmental attorney Jim Blackburn and RAF’s respected litigation team, Charles Irvine and Mary Conner of the Irvine & Conner Law Firm. Scheduled to speak on policy efforts will be Roger Gingell, an RAF board member and attorney with a legislative policy background.

Key differences between the White Oak Bayou and the RAF lawsuits

RESIDENTS AGAINST FLOODING:

WHITE OAK BAYOU PROPERTY OWNERS:

1. Lawsuit is against City of Houston AND Memorial City Redevelopment Authority, aka TIRZ 17

1. Lawsuit was against Harris County Flood Control

2. Federal lawsuit

2. State lawsuit

3. Suing for REMEDY to protect against future flooding, not for money

3. Sued for money for past flood damages

4. RAF contends flooding is result of lax building codes and irresponsible development, permitted by the City, without proper flood mitigation

4. Claimed that county government inaction resulted in flooding

5. If victorious, will not add any costs to the City of Houston budget. RAF is not asking for hand-outs, only that the public money already earmarked for this purpose be allocated for flooding mitigation projects

5. Would have cost county $85 million

6. If victorious, may result in a Special Master being assigned by the federal judge. That person will ensure that flood and drainage projects are carried out by the City within a timeline determined by the judge. Oversight would be maintained until the Court is satisfied that Plaintiffs’ homes will receive adequate flood protection.

6. County would have been liable that its future operations could damage someone’s property

Below is a map showing where the apartments flooded in the Greenspoint area during the April 18, 2016 flood. Note that all of the apartments that flooded are in the 100-year floodplain for Green’s Bayou and some of the apartments are actually within the floodway – the no build zone set up along bayous and streams. While we understand that some of these apartments were built before the floodway ordinance, surely the 100-year floodplain was in place. Look closely and you’ll see that there are no detention ponds associated with most, if not all, of these apartments. Look around Houston. How many apartments are built in areas close to bayous? How many have installed detention? Did they pay a fee in lieu of detention? Was that fee used to build detention within the watershed where they were built or in some other unrelated watershed? Were any of the residents of these apartments aware that they were in the floodway or the 100-year floodplain for Green’s Bayou? Could the 1800 apartments here that flooded be called a man-made disaster? You bet your wet a$$ they can!!